1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic disk feeding device for disk duplication system and method thereof which can feed the disc automatically during the copy process and can take out the disc automatically after completion of copy.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Using optical medium to store data has the advantages of small size and large capacity, in order to meet the current requirements of high definition and high quality audio, the optical disk has become an indispensable medium for today's life. Nowadays, the disk is usually used to record, duplicate or save various signal data, including video, music, computer software, and etc.
Normally, mass produced optical disks must be subjected to a process of mass disk pressing, and the least required production quantity is at least numbered by thousands. However, although such a disk pressing method can perform mass production, the recording, duplicating or saving process still needs to be done disk by disk, and the disk-by-disk process is also the problem disturbing the production mostly. For economic reasons, nowadays, manufacturers have adopted automatic disk burning/recording, feeding, ejecting, changing and packaging devices; hence, automatic production machines have been the mainstream of equipments in the current market.
The current automatic production machines are described as follows:
For example, a disk duplication device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,141,298 is provided with several burning devices which are superpositioned and stacked in the same disk burning equipment, and is further provided with a mechanical pick-up device which is rotatable and movable up and down for automatically picking up the master disk, blank disk and burned disk. However, this conventional equipment has a very complicated structure and is very high in production and operation costs. Further, in order to achieve automation but without considering the waste of space, the whole structure of this conventional equipment occupies a huge amount of space. Besides the inconveniences of package, transport and logistic, it will occupy too much space of the manufacturer's factory.
Another example is a disk feeding device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,490,232, which utilizes a transfer device to drive an arm to rotate and move up and down for facilitating delivery and pickup of blank disk from those stacked in the disc holder, then puts the blank disk into the disc-carrying member of the printer, and finally picks up the printed disk from the disc-carrying member of the printer and puts it into another holder where the disks are stacked. This disk feeding device is also complicated in structure and occupies a lot of space.
Especially, the activity of this conventional disk feeding device taking out one disk from the stacked disks step by step must relies on a complicated pick-up device to rotate and move the arm up and down. The whole operating structure is quite complicated, and the operation of the pick-up device and the arm also requires a quite amount of space. Hence, the abovementioned conventional devices need to be further improved.
To have a simplified structure and a reduced installed space, the inventor of this application has particularly invented an automatic disk feeding and duplication device as disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/669,931, with reference to FIGS. 1 and 2, which comprises: a frame 10, a disk holder 11, a transport assembly 12 and a copy unit 13. The copy unit is disposed in the frame, and the disk holder is mounted on the frame corresponding to the copy unit. The frame is provided with a set of movable push members located corresponding to the disc tray of the copy unit. Each push member has an outward restoring force and is caused to move up and down by sway of the transport assembly, thus achieving the effect of feeding disks one by one to the copy unit. The disks after burning can be taken out by the push members cooperating with the transport assembly. Finally, the push members are restored outward to release the disk onto a disk-ejecting member, thus finishing the disk duplication in a quick and continuous manner. Advantageous as it is, the previous invention of the inventor of this invention still has some disadvantages that need to be improved.
The present invention has arisen to mitigate and/or obviate the afore-described disadvantages.